Freedom to Change

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The United States contains twenty-five percent of the world's prison population. Innovative rehabilitation programs can offer effective tools to help prisoners re-enter society and stay out of prison. In this short film, Path of Freedom, we meet Fleet Maull, a former inmate who teaches basic meditation practices to prisoners. In this lesson, explore the themes of freedom and social justice.

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The film, Path of Freedom, explores an innovative approach to rehabilitating prisoners at John J. Moran Medium Security Facility, a Rhode Island men's prison. Fleet Maull, a former inmate and founder of the Prison Mindfulness Institute (PMI), teaches basic meditation techniques at Moran, empowering prisoners to take responsibility for their lives. In 1989, while serving a 14.5-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for drug smuggling, Maull founded the PMI and led a twice-weekly meditation group in the prison chapel. Today, his focus includes programs for prison guards and administrators to help transform the corrections system as a whole.

According to a 2014 National Research Council report, United States incarceration rates have more than quadrupled in the last four decades, bringing the effectiveness and growing costs of our prison system under increasing scrutiny. As stated in the report, the U.S. now has the highest incarceration rate in the world, housing approximately 1 in 100 adults on any given day.

Innovative programs, like the PMI, bring meditation, art, theater, and dance into prisons. Their methods and techniques, designed to help inmates develop insight, impulse control, empathy, and improve decision-making, are often founded on evidenced-based approaches to social emotional learning. Studies have shown that addressing cognitive and psychological patterns within inmates supports prosocial behavior after inmates are released, reducing recidivism, or the act of repeating criminal behavior.

Nelson Mandela, the former President of South Africa from 1994-1999, was imprisoned for 27 years for his revolutionary work in protest of apartheid, a system of racial segregation in South African. Mandela said, "To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."